It still misses something basic for a commuter bike, a mudguard.

An urban or commuting bike without one makes no sense whatsoever.

Chances are, you can buy a bicycle that is 'made' by whatever your favourite car brand is.

Need a Ferrari bicycle? How about a Ford, a BMW, a Mercedes or anything else?

Chances are that there is a bicycle out there with your favourite car logo slapped on the headtube. And none of them have sold, maybe with the exception of Peugeot, but they got out of bicycles too (albeit to license the brand). Note that Peugeot and scores of other auto companies started with bicycles before adding motors and wheels, so bicycles should be a core competency.

As for Rivian and their bicycle, they will sell a few to people that just want the bed of their truck to have a bicycle in it. Non-Rivian truck owners? They will take a pass.

But as a 'halo product', it should work. They can get the marketing they want from it.

Efficiency here is the NFR that would be like: perfect is the enemy of good.

Think of this an electric bike with optional pedal assist from the human. Efficiency is irrelevant if the range is large enough.

>The whole "pedaling to load the battery" is both inefficient (you'll lose north of 70% of energy on the most efficient bike dynamos) and less reliable than having a direct link between your pedals and the wheel

Can't you still run it downhill and regain energy? A lot of downhills in the city can't utilize the gravity all the way, instead having red lights just at the bottom of the hill

Electric generator->battery->electric motor drive train should be fairly efficient. I'd be surprised if it was lower than 80%.

Traditional dynamos are fairly small parasitic loads and not really comparable.

I'm assuming the thought process behind the pedal->generator->traction motor is that you can keep the cadence in the ideal / most efficient range. Problem with mid drives is that (at least for me), I prefer lower cadence which means driving the hub drive at a less efficient range.

I don't hate it, but I'm curious to see what they think their target audience is.

Is it someone that wants to do a "last mile" from their car/train to office? Is it a car replacement? Is it a weekend farmers market family bike?

I feel like all of these require emphasis on different aspects. If it's a last mile commuter, it needs to be light / small so it can fit on a train or car trunk. Probably also needs to be light so it's luggable into/out of the trunk by an average person.

I guess for me, the most interesting ebike idea is that of a "last mile(s)". Something that I can easily pack in the trunk, and depending on my mood, allow me to park ~5-7 miles from work and cycle the rest of the way in. There are bits of my commute near my office that are often at a standstill, and ebiking would be significantly faster to skip those. This is much less of a commitment compared to doing the entire 20mi commute by bike.

There are plenty of modern ebikes that are just bikes with a motor. I have one of these for instance (well, the previous generation): https://ride1up.com/product/roadster-v3/

The best description I've seen of using it is "cycling without hills".

The fact that we use the same name for these and "low speed electric motorcycles" is... unfortunate.

I think that the Class 1 and Class 2 and Class 3 regulations when properly followed tell you what you are getting. Since this is Class 3, it really is close to a Moped and has a lot more restrictions depending on your area similar to a motorcycle but still allowed on city streets without insurance in most places in the USA, but often has restrictions in parks etc.

The problem is that many other manufacturers have “selectable” class which really is meaningless and doesn’t really tell you what you are buying and often times is really close to a motorcycle. But unlike cars you can easily import bikes that don’t conform to the regulation so many don’t.

If I were buying a bike for my young child I would stick to class 1 or 2.

Adjusted for inflation the Segway would be close to $10,000 today after taxes.

That price tag and the way overhyped lead up to it's unveiling combined to kill any chance the Segway had. Dean's (RIP, I think) vision might have had a chance if it wasn't the same price as a lightly used new-to-me Kia Sephia.

At even half the $5000+ price it would have found a lot more adoption. Tourism companies still use the shit out of them and once they start dumping them, I bet they'll be the cool thing to have.

It depends on what you mean with an e-bike, most e-bikes are pedelecs.

That means they don't have a throttle which is what a motorcycle or moped has.

You have to pedal to get an assist, this can either be a hub drive or a mid drive motor which have different characteristics (that's another story).

The one thing about e-bikes that I don't get is: why the chain?

https://www.voromotors.com/products/emove-roadrunner-v3-seat...

This thing has 500W hub motors, no expensive derailleur, no chain to maintain, just tires and brakes. The hub motors have internal gearing. I love mine for getting around LA.

After seeing yet another brutal accident of an ebike yesterday, I suspect regulation is coming, including requiring drivers to be licenced the same way motorcycle operators are, vehicles registered the same way, and liability insurance required.

The comments you are agreeing with: there's a lot about mopeds and drivetrains and Class 1/3, and yet nobody sees that this piece of shit doesn't even have fenders?

Mopeds but with crappier seats. Mopeds at least had decently comfortable seats and could seat a passenger —if we’re considering normal BMI folks.

It is a trope at this point. I think Rivian has done a pretty good job here, but the trope is that the non-bike companies wanting to implement their technology, also feel the need to reinvent the bicycle part of the bicycle. Ignoring the decades of learning about what value a bicycle actually provides, and treats it like a technology problem.

Bikes are simple for a reason, they're light for a reason, they are maintainable for a reason, their ergonomics have been refined over decades, and so on.

I don't think non-bike companies shouldn't have a crack, it's fun to see new takes on it all, but bikes have been "disrupted" already by a dozen different forms of transport, they stick around in their current form because it fits well into the gaps the other modes leave. There's no big new problems to solve with the bicycle aspect, just pop your cool drivetrain into a regular bike and you at least get to keep the broader market of cyclists as customers.

I would hope they designed it where you can keep riding. It seems possible. Pick some charge level (say 20%) and provide less and less power assist as you approach that. Once you hit 20%, a control system tries to keep it about 20% charged. Basically you enter a mode where the battery becomes a buffer (between the pedal and wheels) rather than a power source. The bike would feel sluggish, but it wouldn't stop working.

This is an electric motorcycle with pedals. The presence of pedals that only-technically contribute to motion is a regulatory-dodge not an intended feature.

> So unlike a normal e-bike, when its battery dies it turns into a stationary bike.

Maybe you pedal the generator on the kickstand for a minute to give it enough charge to operate the electronics, and then away you go working hard like on any other e-bike that's out of charge? I don't see why it couldn't move.

When a normal ebike dies you are left with a 50-60lb bike probably not with the gearing you’d want.

Just don't think of it as an e-bike.. Think of it as an electric scooter with a built-in, manual charging solution. The question then seems to be how well it compares against other electric scooters?

"E-bikes" are much more efficient than electric cars, but they're just electric scooters with governors at this point, and only called "bikes" for regulatory reasons.

It’s got double the range of any e-bike I’ve been around. On a full charge you’ll get very uncomfortable long before you reach half capacity. I think the pedals are only to fit into a certain vehicle category and perhaps to a lesser degree for range-extension. The expectation is that you keep it charged via an outlet.

While this is true, I've dealt with a sudden battery failure on my old model ebike (a kalkhoff from 2018 or so) and I can tell you that without any motor assist the bike might as well be stationary. It is quite heavy.

Maybe they figure you pedal to charge it up before it’d go again -like a windup torch. It’s energy wasteful but who knows what marketing forced the engineers to do.

I’d rather electric car companies building bikes than cyber trucks, though they are in the same vanity category.

If I may also peddle my opinion, this e-bike is a fresh innovation and it's easy to see how revolutionary it is. What very competitive market has regen, 180 newton-meter of torque, programmable power curve, shape-shifting? This e-bike is incredible. These days, who lets their iphone battery die?

In the next sentence:

"It features a new pedal-by-wire drivetrain called “DreamRide” developed in-house. The rider pedals a generator, which replenishes the battery,"

So uh, keep peddling?

Yes, the motion->electric->motion circuit is not as efficient as direct pedal but you are explicitly not stranded.

Regen braking is how you can tell this was designed by a moron. The energy balance simply does not favor regenerative braking on a bicycle, especially a bicycle that flippantly ignores aerodynamics like this one does. A bicyclist loses roughly all of their energy to air resistance. It's not a truck. There is not substantial potential energy to be recaptured going down hills.

Rivian figures they can take the 149,000Wh they would've put into a $100,000 truck, split it into 186 ebikes and take home $837,000.

My eBike is close to 90lbs, but it is a large cargo bike touted as a "small car replacement". It is close to a tandem bike in size with a steel frame. I'm so used to it now, but I live in a house and never need to carry it up stairs. It does mean that I need an expensive bike rack to support that weight.

My Stromer ST3 weights about 30kg, has an 1kWh battery but doesn't come anywhere close to even 100km range at full speed.

I suspect pedal-by-wire will only be slightly heavier since it doesn't need gears, but the range will probably be even worse.

800 wh and 100 miles? There is no way anyone gets that.

800 watt hours for $4,500 is absurd too.

It's difficult to say these numbers are believable or not as they depend on speed and pedal input, but given my own experience and reading some tests/forum, they are off by 2x to 3x.

>"808Wh battery and 100 miles of range. These two numbers track with each other and are roughly believable."

Absolutely not. Unless you have baby in a saddle and going 10mph

My local bicycle dealer has models in the window up to 15k$. There’s a market for such priced products.

Why would anyone use Dropbox when you can self host a linux VM with a file share using a VPN to tunnel?

What kind of capacity from your LFP battery? Is it diy built? I did one in the spring 16S with 25Ah cells and it's been amazing since. Only problem is it's a bit too big to fit anywhere I'd like it to. I have to mount it on a rear rack

The components are all probably very junky, if everything can be had for $450

Its an interesting idea and the engineer in my agrees with you. Then the product skeptic says that anyone who wants to ride a bike as a form of exercise and get around using a bike, would probably just ride a normal bike.

I don't get what you mean, electric scooters are already a thing? At least in most countries in Europe they are classified the same type of vehicle as pedal-assisted e-bicycles and are capped at 25km/h and can ride in the bike lanes. If they go faster they are classified as full motorcycle and have to ride on the road with the cars and requires a license and a license plate (regardless if electric or non-electric).

https://dualwheeljourney.com/mopeds/swedish-moped-class-1-an...

> get rid of the vestigial pedals.

Pedal-assisted is very much not a vestigial category, plenty of people want to get exercise and not just ride a scooter. On top of that they massively increase the range of the bicycle and the bicycle is still usable when the battery runs out.

I've been annoyed by this as well for a while. I have a non-electric cargo bike but I don't care if others have pedals or not. I'm more scared of a bakfeit mum zooming through at 25km/h than a lightweight Chinese-style moped going slower than that. Regulating who can go where by speed and weight would make much more sense than creating all these arbitrary categories in my opinion.

If only there were some way to take all that work of pedaling and efficiently translate it into torque on the rear wheel, right?

I was in the market for a commuter recently and my runner-up was this bike from Bulls (German brand trying to break into the US market) with full suspension, a Bosch motor, and coming in at a staggeringly light 58 lbs (battery included) for $3300. Extremely tempting, if I hadn't managed to snag a heavily-discounted Aventon Level 2 instead. https://bullsbikesusa.com/products/iconic-evo-tr-1-750

I really don't get what the point of the pedals on a thing like this, though. I guess mainly to satisfy some sort of regulations which separate bikes and motorcycle like vehicles? Considering that they aren't even connected to the drivetrain...

Why do you need full sus on a commuter though? I think it's a gimmick that's not worth the 4500

A really good deal based on what? You can buy bikes with double the battery off amazon for a quarter of the price. What are you comparing this to?

The article clearly states it’s class 3.

"Honestly" does not make it a "really good" deal.

It's an e-bike. The competition is stiff, better looking, and better priced.

If they're lucky, this will appeal to university professors and over achieving parents of unsuspecting kids who want a cool bike but got an expensive dorky one instead.

you can get a high quality 4khw 20kw electric dirt bike for $4500... oh right, maybe not the best for commuting. they were fun before the cops caught on.

> How about doing something simple, reliable and cheap?

Like Rad Power Bikes? Though IIRC they're not doing too well at the moment.

I have a Juiced bike myself for the commute, it's quite nice.

You‘re in luck BMW recently presented their vision CE.

https://www.bmwmotorcycles.com/en/experience/stories/urban-m...

And 5. no helmet necessary! They actually did make a concept version of this, the C1-E: https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/tv-footage/detail/PF00...

The weather protection is great for positive temperatures - you can protect yourself from sun and rain. Unfortunately, for those in cold weather, two wheeled vehicles make little sense.

yeah but what's the point? At this price point alibaba monsters are far more powerful and real bicycles far more bicycle-like. These will sell a 10-20k units and fade into obscurity like Van Moofs and other disruptive bicycles before them.

I've seen a lot of people use noise cancelling ear buds on roads using pedal bikes, so I don't see how this is any different really.

Dirt bikes and many motorcycles also have chains, this allows you to change gears to adjust torque (alternatives include shaft and belt drives).

E-bikes can have the motors on the wheel (hub-drive) or on the pedal (mid-drive). This choice is largely related to how much you want your e-bike to really be a scooter or really be providing pedal assist. As a consequence hub-drive e-bikes typically have a throttle while mid-drive do not.

A good mid-drive e-bike really makes it feel like you are a super human cyclist rather than riding a scooter. It leads to a much smoother riding experience if your aim is to still be essentially bicycling but you'd like to get moving faster and not break a sweet even on the most extreme hills.

Putting the motor into the wheel makes for an excellent riding experience, I have a Bionx rear wheel (out of business) that is connected to the chain ring and pedals in the traditional way. The wheel detects torque from pedaling and applies it's own torque to drive the wheel. It can be used with and without power and feels almost seamless and is silent.

Unfortunately it seems to be difficult to engineer and build these wheel motors for reliability and longevity. They significanly increase the unsprung mass of the wheel which leads to increased wear on the hub components.

The biggest reason is minimizing unsprung mass, the performance of the rear suspension would be much worse with a hub motor.

So it will appear as a bicycle and be allowed on paths in parks (is what I'm guessing).

It's not clear if their design allows for it from the details in the article, but you'd want a chain in case you run out of battery so you can pedal manually.

mid-drive e-bikes like this one are generally more expensive also but more efficient than rear hub motor systems. They also provide better overall weight distribution.

Amazon has been using a vehicle that looks very similar to the enclosed version in upper Manhattan the last few months. Given their existing relationship with Rivian maybe they have some kind of early access.

We have quite a lot of those sort of things in London. They don't seem to cause much problems. They certainly clog the roads much less than conventional commercial vehicles.

You build bigger lanes. Paris and London are quickly learning this lesson.

bikes are already highly "modular" in that outside of ebike motor systems you can swap most parts. Bikes like the Rivian in the article would only work if ruggedized and sold to fleets. As a consumer you'd just get something from Specialized at this price point since it won't be worthless in 2 years time.

USB-C support is honestly one of the most exciting features. I guess it's an efficiency/profit thing, but it's wild to me how many ebikes have weird proprietary chargers.

There's nothing wrong with hydraulic disc brakes on an e-bike, except that hydraulic brakes are hard to maintain yourself without special tools. All e-bikes need disc brakes, period. Any e-bike (or any merely heavy bike) is unsafe without disc brakes. Whether those brakes are mechanical or hydraulic doesn't matter nearly as much as the fact that they use discs.

Hydraulic brakes are great. I have them on two bikes and would certainly buy them again.

The bike cost nowhere near $4500 and certainly doesn't have any "smart" integration other than a holder for my phone, which I added myself for $13.

There's literally thousands of e-bikes with touch screens and it would be unsafe for a bike of this weight to have anything other than hydraulic disc brakes, which are the standard for just about anything that isn't a road bike these days. Locator also pretty common even on $1,000 ebikes.

But yes, other stuff seems to be features for the sake of features.

Having hydraulic disc brakes on a bicycle like this isn't something odd. Tons of regular bicycles have them these days.

The only kind of weird thing I see here is the idea the pedals aren't actually directly connected to the drive train, they just turn a generator.

I wouldn’t lump disk brakes in with the rest of those, maybe the hydraulic part is overkill though.

I'm with you on the automatic lock/unlock and full-touch controls, I don't like either of those design choices in cars and I don't want them in a bike either.

That said a GPS locator is great on an e-bike. They're high value theft targets, anything that makes them harder to steal, easier to track, or otherwise reduces the appeal of stealing one is a good thing.

Hydraulic disc brakes are a great thing even on non-electronic bikes. I won't buy another bike without them. My hardtail mountain bike, gravel bike, and e-cruiser are all hydraulic discs.

Hydraulic disc brakes are table stakes for a mountain or gravel bike nowadays. Dual or preferably quad piston calipers on a big rotor make a significant difference when it comes to stopping power.

I wonder if you can still ride it if they turn their server off?

"activates and deactivates when the rider is nearby"

sounds iffy like that. I was riding a Forest bike yesterday where the user app and bike both have to connect to Forest's servers and it's kind of a pain.

To me this looks like how people who never use a bike imagine a good bike. I am ok with the brakes but the rest just makes the bike more complex and expensive with possible planned obsolescence. I don't want to deal with firmware updates for my bike.

What does "NFS" stand for in this context?

https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/NFS

What? lol

The issue with juicero is that their hardware design was needlessly and insanely over complicated, like magnitudes past anything I’m seeing here - and they DRMd something that didn’t need to be DRMd (juice)

For this bike, those are features people regularly want in e-bikes and cost very little to add - the bike already needs a capable cpu for battery management and acceleration curve controlling.

These are features that people differentiate these pseudo motorcycles on. “We” have learned the lesson.

The helmet is very juicero tho

ah yes hydraulic disk brakes on like 80lbs bike is exactly like juicero

If the motor is geared it could make a difference. For comparison, most people put out about 100 watts with their legs, but need to downshift to go up hills. This looks like a mid drive unit, which should be capable of varied gearing.

Given it can output 180Nm I expect this thing can get up whatever hill you point it at

At least not their first generation.

I had a look and

> Good enough to make me think the $9,000 / €9,000 starting price isn’t as crazy as I first thought.

I think there may be a limited market at the higher price points given you can get a pretty good ebike for a fraction of that.

Self-plug: you can take a look at our repairable and sustainable battery at https://gouach.com. If it gets depleted, it's super easy to replace cells, getting you a whole new battery for $50 (price of cells) instead of buying a new $200 - $500 battery

I disagree, I went that route and ended up regretting it. While converting a regular bike to an e-bike does work, a standard commuter bike is designed to carry a person’s weight with the center of gravity in mind. Adding an electric hub motor and a 20 lb lithium battery to a frame with cantilever brakes just feels sketchy. A properly designed e-bike typically comes with four-piston hydraulic brakes, and the placement of the motor and battery is engineered to maintain balance and handling.

Electric golf carts have existed since the 1950s, and are the cart type available at most golf courses in the US. Regarding factories, a variant with a pallet mover or fork lift would be handy (but electric lifts are probably the second most common type if they haven't already surpassed propane).

28 mph is the legal max for Class 3 ebikes with pedal assist. It's the max you can usually legally ride without getting into license requirements etc in most of the US.

Game over with a dead battery, I would think, though I suppose it's possible that the generator you're pedaling is enough for very slow movement without the battery boost...

Here in the USA, there are bike lanes and dedicated bike trails everywhere and a great deal of ebike adoption. The problem is that regulatory frameworks haven’t caught up and public sentiment is becoming quite negative when yet another brutal accident happens.

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/simpsons/images/0/05/TheHo...

(https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer)

A classic Simpsons episode!

"Powerful like a gorilla, yet soft and yielding like a nerf ball..."

I guess the difference is these can "legally" ride on sidewalks

inadequate suspension to be classified as a motorbike imo

Why?

> Price is the primary decider

That's not even true for normal bicycles. Serious cyclists can spend massive amounts of cash on their rides.

Aside from that, if you're using this as a vehicle you want more than just the cheapest thing out there. Reliability and serviceability are important when not having the bike means you can't get to work or your kid's school.

Look again. This is pedal by wire.

If it is broken the pedals will just spin because there is no mechanical link between the pedals and the parts that make the vehicle move.

> Typical 2020s design trying to appeal to the smartphone/sedentary crowd who know nothing about bikes.

What's the problem with appealing to that crowd?

“metrosexuals”? what a whiplash to 2005 lmao